i whored for art…

Fest — 7 (and various things)

The last week we spent back in the Volks Oper rehearsal studios where we remain until later today when we retrace our steps to Kasino Theater for two probably gloriously chaotic days of setting up, rehearsing, and on Saturday night, performing. In the meantime, Giacomo arrived from Italy (and has been occupied watching Breaking Bad until the early morning hours) and the coffee intake has naturally increased.

Back one week. The bike ride in +30º late-afternoon summer warmth from Währinger Str to Wien-Meidling train station turned out to be somewhat longer than expected, and Dasniya’s train was early. We met nonetheless, on the platform, she with a suitcase bearing a blackly iridescent travelling companion, some kind of tenacious flying beetle that had accompanied her and refused to depart. We left it in the grass on the Gürtel as we made our way homeward, me still to return to rehearsal.

The weekend for me was split between rehearsing and Dasniya’s workshop, with a beautiful group of women in the Shibari Dojo, off Mariahilferstr just the other side of the Gürtel. A came along on Tuesday evening also, and found myself tied and slapped by Klaus, the physicist who came to our ImPulsTanz workshop last year.

Rehearsals, then. It’s a little like writing code. When one part is touched up, it shows how another part can be made more elegant, which in turn shows often unexpected inconsistencies and oddities in completely unrelated places. By the end of last week we’d more-or-less found an end and much of the work has been going back and forth the length of the work, rewriting, cutting, editing. Switching rehearsing from Kasino to Volks Oper also has changed it; the latter is very much a rehearsal space.

From my point of view writing here, having seen so many times those very disturbing moments in the first two acts, and how they sit within the text, it’s difficult to say much without giving things away. The Saturday is a 11pm, and the day will be around 36º, which means Kasino will be an airless oven, somehow appropriate for the ghastly eighty-minute goings-on of the three acts.

We seem to have come to conclusions in the work, in the text; every pass through and run becomes a more fine stitching of things. Decisions are often on the most detailed level now, how a person moves, turns their head, pauses solves the problem or gives the meaning on the larger scale. Still things to decide though, music, costumes, lights (Giacomo runs a lighting desk on his laptop and spent yesterday programming some broad ideas – much better than having to wait for non-existent access to the theatre and having to tangle with a new board), how to shave off various minutes from the acts. Returning to Kasino I think will answer a lot of this, and obviously make a hash of things we thought were sorted.